Residential meditation retreats impose conditions that look excessive to an outsider: no conversation, no reading, no devices, and a schedule leaving no decisions to be made. Each restriction addresses a specific obstacle.
The gaps between sessions determine what the sessions can do
Practice at home is separated by hours of ordinary activity, and each period of activity generates fresh material for the mind to work through.
A session that begins by processing the intervening day spends much of its time on that rather than on the practice.
Retreats close the gaps by making the periods between sessions as uneventful as possible, so successive sessions build on each other.
Conversation is the largest generator of material
Talking creates continuing threads: things said that are reconsidered afterwards, impressions being managed, plans made.
Those threads persist into the next session and are among the most persistent forms of mental activity practitioners encounter.
Removing speech removes the source, which is why silence rather than solitude is the central rule in most retreat settings.
Removing decisions removes a second source
Fixed schedules for waking, eating, sitting and sleeping mean participants make almost no choices across a day.
Choosing is itself a form of mental activity, and its removal is reported by participants as one of the more noticeable effects of the setting.
This is also why food is provided rather than selected and why the timetable is announced rather than negotiated.
Participants often describe the first day as constraining and the third as a relief, which is the point at which the absence of decisions stops being experienced as a restriction.
Restricted input reduces new content
Reading, writing and devices are usually prohibited because each supplies new material that the mind then processes during practice.
The restriction is often the one participants find hardest, since these are the habitual means of managing boredom and discomfort.
That difficulty is part of the design, as the discomfort that surfaces when those means are unavailable is frequently what the practice is meant to meet.
The intensity carries risks worth knowing about
Extended intensive practice can produce difficult psychological experiences, including intrusive memories, marked anxiety and distortions of perception.
Established retreat centres screen applicants, provide access to teachers throughout and have procedures for participants who become distressed.
Anybody with a history of significant mental health difficulty should discuss an intensive retreat with a clinician beforehand rather than treating it as a period of rest.